Active Athlete Media and the emergence of niche ad networks

By Dan Kaplan 07.26.07

Advertising networks are the hottest companies of 2007. They are getting scooped up for figures in the hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars.

No surprise, then, that entrepreneurs keep emerging with new ones. The latest to grab attention are those targeting niches. There's Glam for women's sites. There's Federated Media for tech. Now there's the sport networks.

Active Athlete Media, which exclusively targets a wide range of sports-related sites, has managed to achieve some promising growth since the beginning of this year. Not content to merely serve ads, however, the company has developed a search engine that it will tailor to the needs of each sports specialty in its publisher network.

Sports is a lucrative market to target. Including sponsorships, TV rights, advertising and merchandise, total spending in the sports market is $43.6 billion and expected to rise to $61.6 billion by 2010, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers. There's plenty of action here recently. For example, Takkle, Inc, a social network for high school sports, recently nailed an undisclosed amount funding from Sports Illustrated and the New York City Investment Fund.

San Francisco's Active Athlete Media claims 12 million unique impressions, putting it ahead of the ad impressions enjoyed by mainstream sites Sports Illustrated, MLB.com, and Nascar.com - though Comscore says Active Athlete Media's number closer to eight million, which still puts them ahead. It has signed exclusive deals with sports sites of all stripes - from those focused on running triathlons to kiteboarding and tow-surfing. Active Athlete's value proposition is that it reaches people who actually play sports, and don't just watch them, enabling the precision-targeting of ads to a demographic that spends a lot of money on its passions.

Along with its ad network, the company builds sport-specific search engines, which, like Google Co-Op and Eurekster's Swickis, search the web for content explicitly relevant to the publisher's site. Active Athlete's search engine is tailored to dig up user-generated content from blogs and forums, which the company thinks will be more useful to its audience than a list of sites. And of course, Active Athlete's ads will show up next to the results. The company has also built a social bookmarking service, but with the overwhelming plethora of well-known options out there, it's hard to see that part catching on.